nasal(ized) taps and flaps

While de-lurking briefly, I found this.

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, David Peterson wrote:

> And another thing, why can't there be a nasal flap?  The /n/
> in "never" sounds a lot different than the "nn" in
> "running".  If I were to replace both with a stop-like
> sound, "never" would get a /d/, "dever", and "running" would
> definitely get a flap.  Am I just crazy that I can hear and
> feel this difference?
You are not crazy, and there is in fact such a thing as a nasal
flap (or tap), though it's probably best to call it a nasalized
flap, for aerodynamic reasons. Some varieties of English (like
mine) distinguish 'winter' from 'winner' only by the presence of
a nasalized flap in the former and a [n] in the latter, at least
in casual speech.

Gosiute (a dialect of Shoshoni) also has a voiceless nasal tap
as a realization of underlying /hn/ intervocalically:

        /sukkuhnai/ -> [sukUR~ai]  'over there'

(where <r> is a tap, <~> is nasalization of the preceding
segment, and capitalization represents voicelessness)

Blew my mind the first time I heard it, but it makes perfect
sense (at least in the speech of the person I heard it from).

Re-lurkingly,

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir

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